Letter by a Doctor for Dean

[dkf]

On the blog by a "Doctor for Dean":

Dr. Dean learned about the inequities of the health care system initially while volunteering prior to med school at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan. Then as a doctor practicing over ten years in rural Vermont he saw first hand the tragedy that can happen when patients could not afford healthcare- from the young needing immunizations, to women needing mammograms, to the elderly needing prescription medications.

As Governor of Vermont for over ten years, Dean never forgot these lessons - and was in a unique position to help. Dr. Dean made it his mission to improve care to all medically and socially vulnerable populations in Vermont. Under his stewardship, 96% of children had insurance. New social protections dramatically decreased rates of child abuse and teenage pregnancy fell 49%, to the lowest rate in the country. Dean required that health care plans needed to include treatment for psychiatric disease on par with treatment of physical diseases. And access to mammograms improved as did treatment for women with breast and cervical cancer.

Dr. Dean also created a program providing drug benefits to approximately one third of seniors least able to afford them. He was a pioneer spearheading a regional effort to bring cheaper drugs from Canada into the states. Furthermore, Dean instituted programs that provided a range of home health services to seniors so that they could continue to live with dignity rather than be forced prematurely into nursing homes. Nursing home placements fell 20 % in Vermont through the 90's.

Governor Dean did this all while he improved Vermont's fiscal footing. Because of his practical success of bringing health care to those down and out, Dean, a governor of a tiny state, was chosen as chairman of the National Governors' Association at a time when the nation needed his leadership on health care issues. Back in the 1990s experts projected that the Medicare trust fund would run out of funds in 2002 if nothing was done to reform the program.

Along with other prominent Democrats, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Chris Dodd, Dr. Dean advocated for fiscal responsibility and improving the bureaucratic mess of Medicare to rein in year-to-year cost increases to 7% in order to protect benefits to seniors at a time when benefits were under attack. "The Chairman of the Nat. Governors' Association, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, yesterday ripped into the Republicans' welfare reform plan as a policy 'to starve children and kick old people out of their houses' and attacked republican governors in extraordinarily harsh language for helping to negotiate it". (Balz, Wash Post, 1995.)

Two years later, Dean's positions were incorporated in the Balanced Budget Act which took steps needed to slow the rate of growth of Medicare and protect the program probably through 2023. Clinton signed the bill in 1997. Later that year, Clinton said of Dean "(W)hatever it is that Howard Dean knows, or whatever it is that he eats for breakfast every morning, if I could give it to every other Democratic office holder and would-be office holder, we would immediately become the majority in the Congress and we would have about 35 governors. I have to tell you, I think a big part of it is just producing for people, actually doing what you say you're going to do at election time."

And as Howard Dean has said, "It is hard to have social justice without a balanced budget."

[Cha]

1. Nice! Thanks for the "letter" from the Doctor..